Jersey City Fire Kills Family of Four

A firefighter inspects a charred home while standing on a ladder from a fire truck in Jersey City, N.J. on Thursday.

Associated Press

A four-alarm fire tore through a Jersey City residential block early Thursday, killing an elderly pastor, his wife and two grown children, the mayor said.

Mayor Steven Fulop said a communication error resulted in firefighters initially responding to the wrong address, following the fire’s outbreak shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday.

Mr. Fulop said a dispatcher initially erroneously relayed to emergency responders that the fire was on Grand Street instead of Grant Avenue, after receiving a 911 call from a “panicked caller.”

This led to a seven-minute response time instead of the usual three to four minutes, he said.

But Mr. Fulop said it was already a multi-alarm fire by the time firefighters arrived on scene and cautioned that it was “premature to speculate” on the impact of the mistake. “We’re obviously going to have to do an assessment,” he added.

The mayor said the cause of the fire, which displaced 30 residents, remained under investigation. He added that displaced people were initially taken to a community center in Jersey City; officials are now working with relief organizations, such as the Red Cross, to find them temporary shelter.

A woman reacts near the scene of a four-alarm fire in Jersey City, N.J., on Thursday.

Associated Press

The inferno left behind a scene of devastation: four properties, entirely gutted, sat smoldering Thursday afternoon, with another two neighboring buildings damaged.

Workers were digging up the road to turn off electricity and gas cables; a huge excavator that sat nearby will then demolish the four destroyed buildings, officials said.

According to neighbors, the dead pastor lived in one of the four gutted buildings with his wife and two middle-aged sons, whom they described as disabled. The man also ran a small church at the property.

“It was horrible,” said Violet Robinson, 53, who fled from one of the affected apartments into the street as the fire spread. “The house was engulfed in flames. …We all knew the pastor was in there.”

Neighbors added that he had led a service at the house Wednesday night, hours before the blaze erupted.

A woman, who identified herself as a granddaughter of the pastor, said she was too distressed to talk. She carried away the only item she had been able to retrieve from the blackened scene: a plastic sign bearing the name of her grandfather’s church.

Corrections & amplifications: A dispatcher mistakenly sent firefighters to Grand Street in Jersey City instead of Grant Avenue, where a fire killed four people. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the blaze was on Grand Avenue and firefighters wrongly went to Grant Street.